My Book

I bought a copy, but it wasn’t mine.I stole a copy. Still it felt somehowas if it did not yet belong to me.As if I did not yet belong to it.So I sat down to write it. As the sunput on the moon’s pale skin and shed its own,my fingers made my pen push glossy inkacross the page. Out in the fields, the cowssang ancient songs of mourning and of mating,while in the boxes that contained the humansthe humans sat before their boxes. StillI wrote, and though I did not comprehendeven an insubstantial fragment ofwhat that blood-thick black ink was saying, whatI knew was that when it was done I’d havegrown older, the grimy globe would have grown older,and on my shelf would sit my book, the shrunkengovernor of an antique Chinese province,surveying all that came within his purview,including me, and passing judgment on it.